Name: Why NATO isn't jumping to help Trump with Iran
Uploaded: 2026-03-20T16:06:34.000Z
Duration: 5 min 16 s
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5000 pound bombs designed to blast deep into Iranian missile sites underground.

And the target sites here on the map near the Strait of Hormuz, where oil is the lifeblood and the artery.

Of course, this news comes as President Donald Trump seems frustrated with NATO allies, even floating the idea of just leaving other countries to be responsible for securing that strait.

Joining us now is Neil Ferguson, CBS News contributor and the senior fellow at the Hoover Institution.

So what's the resistance the president seems to have as he's pretty angry with America's allies today?

Well, if you try to understand the European and British response to this war, there are three things you have to bear in mind.

The first is that the opinion polling on the war in Europe and the UK is very negative.

There is very little support indeed for the President and for the war in Iran.

Secondly, the Europeans and the Brits don't have an enormous array of military assets that they can in fact, put at the disposal of the United States even if they wanted to.

But the third thing is that President Trump really antagonized Europeans since he returned for his second term, even more than in the first.

And there's just a great deal of lingering resentment, for example, over the great row over Greenland that dominated events back in January.

So these are the three reasons that nobody's particularly enthused to get involved.

Is there a sense that goodwill is indeed political capital worth protecting?

Well, I think, having spent the day in London, there is a growing realisation, particularly in this Labour government, that quarreling with President Trump, while it might seem politically expedient, could have a very high price tag after this war is over.

Nobody expects the war to last very long after the war.

I think President Trump is going to be very aggrieved at the fact, for example, that the Prime Minister, Sir Keir Starmer, hesitated to make UK bases available at the beginning of the war.

But like the Europeans, Keir Starmer has been in no hurry to provide significant military assistance.

And in particular, nobody wants to be responsible for escorting tankers through the Strait of Hormuz, which the US Navy is rather too busy to do itself.

The I think it's beginning to dawn on people here that this could become a major problem and that what we may be witnessing is one of the great breaches in the transatlantic alliance of its entire existence.

So I think one has to remember President Trump is still going to be president until January 2029 European leaders may live to regret having crossed him on this issue in the way that they have.

I want to ask you about this because in the free press you write the result is the potentiality that President Trump is opening strategic opportunities for China and Russia may be an unintended consequence.

Well, nearly all major conflicts have unintended consequences, and this is no exception.

I think it's only fair to say that at least some people in the administration underestimated the economic implications of the Strait of Hormuz closing.

That's 10% of the world's oil supply stopped dead in its tracks, roughly speaking, as big an oil shock as anything in the 1970s.

But the unintended consequences geopolitically seem to me even more important.

In Ukraine, the Russians are, in effect, no longer incentivized to settle because with much higher oil prices, their budgetary problems are eased.

And China is looking on with great interest as the US Runs down its already fairly sparse stocks of precision missiles.

The Chinese will be calculating just how many we have left in certain categories, such as Tomahawks.

So I have to say that at least in one respect, the Europeans have a point.

There are ways in which this war can go wrong, both economically, not just for the U.S.

but for the world, but also geopolitically for the U.S.

of course, if the Iranian regime obligingly collapses, if somebody appears waving a white flag at some point in the next two weeks, then President Trump will look like the strategic genius and everybody else will have to eat some crow.

If the war looks like it's going to drag on beyond that, or if President Trump carries out his threat simply to walk away, leaving the Strait of Hormuz to others, the then I think that's going to be interpreted as an Iranian victory and it will be again, a very heavy blow for relations between the US and its allies, including its allies in the Gulf.

You really get a sense history is being written in real time and we are all having a front row seat to it.